“The interruptions of the telephone seem to us to waste half the life of the ordinary American engaged in public or private business; he has seldom half an hour consecutively at his own disposal – a telephone is a veritable time scatterer.”

Beneath the surface of our daily life, in the personal history of many of us, there runs a continuous controversy between an Ego that affirms and an Ego that denies.

At present I feel like a caged animal, bound up by the luxury, comfort and respectability of my position. I can’t get the training that I want without neglecting my duty.

Harris had the egotistical dogmatism of the self-made man who had painfully educated himself without contact with superior brains.

It would be curious to discover who it is to whom one writes in a diary. Possibly to some mysterious personification of one’s own identity.

If I had been a man, self-respect, family pressure and the public opinion of my class would have pushed me into a money-making profession; as a mere woman I could carve out a career of disinterested research.

The middle man governs, however extreme may seem to be the men who sit on the Front Bench, in their reactionary or revolutionary opinions.

If I ever felt inclined to be timid as I was going into a room hill of people, I would say to myself, “You’re the cleverest member of one of the cleverest families in the cleverest class of the cleverest nation in the world-why should you be frightened?

Renunciation – that is the great fact we all, individuals and classes, have to learn. In trying to avoid it we bring misery to ourselves and others.

That part of the Englishman’s nature which has found gratification in religion is now drifting into political life.

Religion is love; in no case is it logic.

All along the line, physically, mentally, morally, alcohol is a weakening and deadening force.

Are all Cabinets congeries of little autocrats with a super-autocrat presiding over them?

Work is the best of narcotics, providing the patient be strong enough to take it. I dread idleness as if it were Hell.

The possession of wealth, and especially the inheritance of wealth, seems almost invariably to sterilize genius.

Nature still obstinately refuses to co-operate by making the rich people innately superior to the poor people.

If a weakly mortal is to do anything in the world besides eat the bread thereof, there must be a determined subordination of the whole nature to the one aim no trifling with time, which is passing, with strength which is only too limited.

Thanks to the internet, I buy lots of music, but thanks to my easily distracted nature, I forget about half of it!

Fifty percent of the doctors in this country graduated in the bottom half of their classes.

I really do see it as the start of the second half of my career.

To have the Raiders global, and we’re not going to be able to do that with a half-filled stadium.

I spent 24 and a half years in prison

For me, being onstage for an hour and a half, my confidence was really huge for me. Doing eight shows a week for a run.

Sensuality, too, which used to show itself course, smiling, unmasked, and unmistakable, is now serious, analytic, and so burdened with a sense of its responsibilities that it passes muster half the time as a new type of asceticism.

My dad told me, ‘It takes fifteen years to be an overnight success’, and it took me seventeen and a half years.